Measurement has been one of the open challenges in the podcast industry. As the medium continues to grow, universal metrics will be key to its success. At Acast, we believe in the power of audio and have embraced measurement and reporting since the beginning of our business.

Since our founding in 2014, we have become the platform of choice for more than 2,000 content creators around the world. We serve more than 56million listens on our platform globally and we take the responsibility of being the conduit between consumer, creator, and advertiser seriously.

We have developed measurement standards for our company that are in line with the global standards set by the International Advertising Bureau and the Swedish Podcast Measurement Standards of our home country. When combined with our proprietary data, this gives our partners the best understanding of what is happening on the platform.

Our measurement process is constantly evolving as more reliable methods of identifying real, true, human listens are discovered. We work tirelessly to demystify and simplify the process of understanding who listened to a piece of audio content and what they listened to. Here you’ll find a brief FAQ on our process as it is today, and we promise to keep it updated as things change! Please leave us your email below to learn more.

How do you measure podcasting? Acast takes a holistic approach to measurement. Podcasting, like all digital media, comes with non-human activity like bots that ping the server or spiders that crawl even after a request has been completed or even when the same device or player makes more than one request for just one stream. We look at all activity on our servers across external players, our internal player, websites, phones, computers, cars, and tablets to determine what traffic is coming from a human and what is not.

What does it mean to be IAB compliant? In 2016, the IAB (International Advertising Bureau) established the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines with the aim of creating a common set of ad metrics in the podcast space to increase the accuracy of measuring the industry including podcast downloads, audience size, and ad delivery. Acast is a member of the IAB’s podcast working group

How does Acast define a listen? A listen is a progressive download or full download of a podcast by a Unique human User.

What are Acast’s proprietary data points? This is a combination of data from users on our platform as well as other tactics such as trackable call to actions, audience surveys, webstie traffic, social media engagement, and more.

How does Acast track listens to shows? We track listens on our app and also to content we host that is listened to somewhere else on Google Play or Stitcher or through the Apple Podcast app.

For our own app or embed player, we can track when the user starts to listen and how long he/she is listening. To be counted as a listen from our apps or the embed player a user has to listen to an episode at least one minute.

From an external player, we are tracking an audio-file and looking to see if it’s been downloaded and how to determine if it is a listen. To use the same one minute of listening standard, we look for 960k bytes of downloaded material.